Of What You Are
by Tala-baby
Summary: He had thought that his memories would be the answer...


Luna: I wrote this for AmunetMana, on A03. I hope this bruises your feelings, precious thing. That's what you get for trying to unleash my inner emotional chaos.

Retribution in 1,000 words.

III

OF WHAT YOU ARE

III

The violent kick out of the little golden box was harsh enough to push his back into the ice, the memories in his hands clattering to the frozen floor with an echo loud enough to make him flinch and Jack Frost sucked in a startlingly cold breath, his lungs fluttering wildly around the brisk chill he swallowed down as air. He was amazed he could actually feel that long-evasive cold for the first time in...he didn't know how long. Blue eyes were wide, lips parted as he fought to draw more air inside, the mere mouthful he had managed to choke past his closed up throat not enough after the painful memory of being buried alive under gallons of frozen water.

He had thought that his memories would be the answer.

He'd seen his mothers smiling face and it was like he had never forgotten it. Her shorn hair and sackcloth dress were ghosts of sensations he could almost feel though it had been over three hundred years since he had felt them. His sisters toothy smile was emblazoned on the back on his eyelids every time he blinked, her bubbling laugh echoing in his ears and it felt like he had always known them. Escapades of racing through woodland and kissing Emma's scrapes after they climbed trees, sliding his food onto her plate so she would have enough to eat in the cold winters so she wouldn't get sick were like stories he'd read a long time ago come back at the trigger of a soft girlish voice calling his name in effervescent whispers.

To see her face again, to remember how much he'd loved his darling little sister was like a spark of human warmth in his chest that he had long forgotten, but to see that face in fear, to hear the tremble in her little voice as she tried to speak his name, to see her doe-soft eyes round in fright as she wobbled precariously over the thin ice that cracked and creaked with her every shudder of panic...

Oh, she had stayed calm, just as he'd asked. Believed in him, just as he'd asked, and as she'd been swung wide from danger's grasping hands, he'd been able to see that bright smile again. Fear had never suited her, he had remembered thinking, Emma should always be smiling.

Even now he could see the way her nose crinkled, her lips turned up, her cheek dimpled as if she were right there with him, her image carved into the snow, looking at him as if he were the only person in her world that mattered. It would only be right, after all, that she love and idolise her brother with the same strength the elder Overland had loved and protected her.

But that smile so quick to shine again after her near-miss with the treacherous lake had morphed all too quickly into horror. Those eyes had peeled wide again, and her mouth had opened, not on a call of joy, but a shriek of dread and he'd barely had time to count those three precious little freckles on her rounded little cheekbone before the floor gave beneath his feet and he plunged into the water.

Jack threw his head back hard enough to hear it crack against the ice behind him but he didn't feel it. His throat gurgled unpleasantly as he tried to breathe through his nose. No use, _no use, too much._ With a sorrowful cry he rolled to his left to try and choke up what felt like the swill of water in his lungs but nothing came out. Dry and cold and frozen, forever half full with little to no room to _breathe_. Wretched whimpering noises spilled out of his mouth instead, desperate and sick and there was snow beneath his hands, numbing his fingers as the warmth of his memories fled them, cold and blinding white and there was ice everywhere. He couldn't breathe. It had _killed_ him.

No, _nonono__**no**_! He couldn't even cry, eyes washed over with a watery sheen that was too cold to shed and frost spiralled over his hands and his face and he could feel it on his chest and neck and oh god, it had killed him. The cold, the ice had split under his feet and he had drowned, _drowned_ in it, watched it close over his head, watched his little sister disappear and his name rang muffled in his ears and her voice was so _scared_ but he couldn't see her. Don't cry, Emma, don't cry!

But she was gone, and he was still here, and he had died, he had saved her but it didn't count because she was still gone and-

His hand struck the memory box as he struggled to push himself up, dry-heaving into the icy floor beneath him and from the corner of his eyes, he could see the slightly curled wisps of his white hair. Hair that wasn't his, strands of pearlescent white, as bright in shade as the ice that had cracked beneath his feet and sent him down into the depths. The cold, dark depths of winter.

He was Winter.

It ran through his veins, like it thought itself a gift bestowed upon him by the Moon. The very thing that threatened the one good thing in his life, that had forever removed him from her side and it flowed through his body as if it was meant to be there. His hands curled into fists in the snow and the way it hardened under his touch, the way it glittered _mockingly_ at him made his insides twist painfully. The very thing that killed him ebbed through his very being like he was a channel for its power and that power had used him for over three hundred years.

Jack felt his shoulders stiffen as if he were detached from himself, outside of his own head. He could feel his mouth open wide enough to hurt, he could feel the hoarse strain of his voice as it thrummed a violent vibrato in his throat, he could see the Moon above him, glimmering down over him with no intent to speak as he reared up.

He could hear his scream as it rattled up to spill over the edges of the chasm he was trapped in.

But he couldn't feel it.

III

Luna: See? That wasn't so bad, was it?


End file.
